


with grateful arms

by turnpikedarling



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-15
Updated: 2015-05-15
Packaged: 2018-03-30 11:57:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3935905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/turnpikedarling/pseuds/turnpikedarling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their hands roaming over his cold, corpse bones is what starts the whole thing.</p><p>He can feel it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	with grateful arms

**Author's Note:**

> this is just self-indulgent flowery ot5 fic ok thank u for ur time
> 
> spoilers for _the raven boys_!

_we have been very brave, we have wanted to know_  
_the worst, wanted the curtain to be lifted from our eyes._  
_this dream going on with all of us in it._

///

Their hands roaming over his cold, corpse bones is what starts the whole thing.

He can feel it. 

As they drag his remains from the hole his parents put him in and carry them back to the ley line, Noah feels the press of each finger on his body where their skin slides over the cool white rot of what’s left of him. When they’re burying him with a soft purpose. When they’re placing him into his new grave. 

That part’s new for Noah. The feeling part. 

Usually everything’s just kind of dulled, but this is full-force back into feeling close to life.

He doesn’t even have a body until they stop, so he’s not sure why it’s happening. He’s just a wisp at the back of their memories while they cover themselves in dirt, elbows deep and digging in, but when Adam’s thumb pulses over the skull he’s holding, Noah feels it in the air where his own skull would be. He can feel Gansey’s nails against the ribs, Blue’s palm against the pelvic bone, Ronan’s breath on the femur. 

He’s always felt separate from his remains, somehow, until now. That was Noah Czerny, too-trusting kid with a skateboard and something to prove, and he was the smudgy kid who never ate. Noah watches, removed, the ghost in him hovering over them while his feet try to touch down.

They aren’t gentle about it, but it’s a fine sight, Noah thinks. His heart bleeding over his bones like that. All their limbs are the spilled red blood he doesn’t have in him anymore. He watches them knowing it’ll be over when they’re done.

As soon as he’s snapped back into being, that touch is gone; Noah can’t feel them on him anymore even though he’s got a body now. He’d waited seven years to find that feeling again, of being alive like that, and this seems to be the choice he was given: he can live among them, cold and actually mostly dead, or he can be a pile of bones and grasp at the warmth of their visits. He doesn’t get both. Just this one compromise.

Noah looks around at the five of them standing in the graveyard and takes a human breath in. It doesn’t make him feel alive, but it’s close. 

When it’s over, everyone slides back into the Pig and Noah settles himself on Blue’s lap even though there’s room on the seat between her and Adam. She wraps an arm around his waist and he fastens her seatbelt for her. Ronan fiddles with the radio until it fills up the night, and it’s enough. The compromise is enough.

 _I’ll take it_ , Noah thinks to himself as Gansey hits the gas and they make another desperate break for the heart of Henrietta.

///

Gansey’s version of highway driving is ten below the speed limit at any given time, so the car is full of complaints the whole way home. As the Pig pulls up in front of 300 Fox Way, Gansey slows to a questionable stop and Adam lurches forward and slams a fist into the back of Ronan’s headrest, sending out a string of swear words colorful enough to make Noah grin and Ronan raise an eyebrow.

From the front seat, Ronan says, “Smooth moves, Gansey.”

“She’s in perfectly fine condition,” Gansey answers.

“I didn’t say anything about the Pig.”

“You were thinking it.”

“I was.”

“Alright, boys,” Blue calls, swinging her door open and hopping out onto the curb. Noah tumbles off her lap and, in the process, Adam gets a ribful of dead-boy elbow.

“Swing by and get me tomorrow before you head over to Cabeswater, okay?” Blue asks, leaning in the open window and knocking her knuckles once on the back of Gansey’s seat. “Mom’s got a reading in the morning, but I’ll be done by noon.”

“Jane’s orders,” Gansey says, saluting her with a wry grin.

Blue leans in a little more and flutters Noah’s hair, and Adam rolls his eyes as the engine starts up again.

“He’s dead, not a toddler,” Adam yells out the window as Blue gets smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror, and the sound of Ronan’s laugh getting drowned out by the wind is sharp and almost unfamiliar. It’s been so long since they let themselves have this, if any of them ever really did.

Adam lets his gaze go blurry as he stares out the window at the back roads between Blue’s place and Monmouth Manufacturing. The back of the car feels different, now, but he’s not really sure why. He looks down to make sure he’s still making a dent in the seat cushion, scratches his nails to see if anything gets stuck underneath. _Maybe_ , he thinks, looking at Noah’s pale skin in the moon and the way he’s stopped flickering in and out, _it’s because I’m a little bit dead now, too_.

“Hey, Parrish,” Ronan says, twisting in his seat and pulling Adam back into focus. “You’re getting ghost guts on your hand.”

Adam looks down and realizes that Noah’s sitting on it, sort of, half of Noah’s leg is covering the tips of his fingers. Adam hadn’t even noticed the weight.

“Are we joking about this now?” Gansey asks, darting his eyes to the back seat for a split second before he snaps them back to the road.

“It’s okay,” Noah says quietly. “I _am_ dead.”

“I didn’t even feel it,” Adam says, and he catches the corners of Noah’s mouth lift and fall in a small smile. A ghost smile. Adam thinks it looks too much like his own sometimes.

“Yeah,” Noah says, shrugging. “I don’t weigh anything.”

Adam knows he isn’t dead the same way Noah is, but he can’t stop staring anyway. Noah gave up his life for the ley line and Adam feels like he did too. He knows he made his own choice, but he left himself on the forest floor and feels drained when he’s not standing knee-deep in Cabeswater. His pulse feels slow, he feels dulled. He wonders if that’s what it’s like for Noah, too.

“You buckled your seatbelt,” he says when his eyes drift to Noah’s lap.

When Noah answers, his voice is so soft that Adam almost misses it. Instead, the sound rolls out of Noah’s mouth and scatters as it hits the noise of the rest of the car rumbling into the Monmouth parking lot. Noah’s on Adam’s left, anyway.

“Old habits,” Noah tells him. 

“Die hard,” Ronan finishes for him as the engine shakes itself into silence, curling his lips up into a wicked smirk.

“Have some tact, Lynch,” Adam spits, and they all follow Gansey out of the car. 

Adam watches Noah the whole way up to the apartment, through the door, onto the chair he floats down into. _Float isn’t the right word_ , he thinks, at least not literally, but it’s what ghosts do. Adam keeps thinking that; he didn’t used to before. Noah, ghost. Noah, ghost. He watches Noah straight through Chainsaw’s squawking and the soft squishy noise of the worms Ronan feeds her while he sits cross-legged on the floor across from them. Chainsaw nips at his fingers and he lets her, and Adam watches Noah.

“Do you have a pulse?” Adam asks, draping himself over the arm of the chair that Noah’s leaning back in, eyes closed and chest slowly rising and falling. He brings his fingers up to Noah’s neck before Noah can respond, feeling around for where it should be.

Ronan snorts. “Have some tact, Parrish,” he parrots back up at Adam.

“I’m just curious,” Adam says. He doesn’t bother looking at Ronan because he already knows the look on his face; he’s seen it too many times, the too-sharp tease that means Ronan feels like he’s caught him in something. Adam’s too fixed on the line of Noah’s throat, dragging his thumb up and down it, feeling what’s underneath. If he could just find something, if he could just feel a beat. 

He knows he won’t. Because Noah’s dead.

“I don’t have one,” Noah says, even as he tilts his chin back and exposes more of his skin for Adam to get his hands on. 

“But what if I just,” Adam murmurs, and then he dips forward and slides his mouth against the hinge of Noah’s jaw.

 _Just in case_ , he tells himself, and bites down hard.

///

When Ronan looks up again, happy Chainsaw with a full belly settled in his palm and finally silent, Adam’s moved from his perch and slunk down into the chair.

He’d only turned away for a second, when Adam was still anxiously trailing his thin fingers below Noah’s ear, down to his collarbone, up to his caved-in cheekbone. Now he’s uprooted Noah onto his lap and is pushing at his shirt, mouth still roaming freely.

Ronan puts a hand in front of Chainsaw’s eyes so it won’t offend her delicate sensibilities.

“There are children here,” he hisses out of the corner of his mouth. 

Adam throws a hand out behind Noah and flips Ronan off. “At least we’re not f-u-c-k-i-n-g in front of the b-a-b-y,” he spells out, leaning back for a second and looking smug.

Ronan glares at him, but something soft in Noah’s eyes makes him bite his tongue. He looks tired. The kind that comes from living a full, long day in the world and not regretting it for once.

There in middle of the dim room, Ronan considers them quietly: tangle of limbs, too much boy already, one who’s been killing himself since the minute he was born and one trying to find his way back to life. He wonders if there’s room between them for a boy who’d rather live in his dreams.

Ronan drops Chainsaw in the middle of knee-high Henrietta and waits for the patter of her little claws to stop as she ruffles her tiny fuzz feathers and tucks in. When she’s settled, he drags his feet over to them and sits, like Adam had, resting on the arm of the chair.

He wonders which one of them he’s more jealous of, if he’s jealous at all. Noah, finally not afraid to feel. Adam, finally not afraid to act. Both of them, for having each other. He decides that he is.

Noah reaches out for him slowly and feels for his arm. Ronan thinks about how they’ve never really touched before, not like this. A handshake, a frozen second as Noah walks by, but nothing gentle as this. It takes Ronan by surprise, how he doesn’t mind the cold. 

“You good?”

Noah loops his fingers around Ronan’s wrist as far as they’ll go, barely touching his middle and thumb over Ronan’s veins. 

“I’m warm,” Noah breathes out, his voice dreamy and light. Beneath him, Adam looks punch-drunk, and Ronan feels softer than he has since Niall died. 

_If Gansey looked at me now, he might see the Ronan he used to know_ , Ronan thinks, and he’s not sure what to do with it. He laughed at Gansey when he thought things like that, spat out that he’d always been this way. 

But he likes how, unexpectedly, wanting something he can really have is what brings him back to himself enough to admit that he doesn’t have to be what people expect of him. It’s not the push-pull of creating his magic totems, but the slam of Noah pulling him down onto the chair with them. His actual reality of the boys he wants, not the things he pulls from his dreams.

“Gansey,” Ronan calls out across the room, hoping the yell will cut through the static noise of Gansey’s headphones. He’d been sitting at his desk for the last hour, sketching the graveyard into his journal and ignoring the rest of the world.

Ronan hears the scrape of Gansey pushing his chair back against the hardwood floor, his feet tapping their way over to this mess. 

“Look,” Ronan tells him when he slides into view. He can see Gansey trying to focus his eyes on the scene in front of him, looking at them like it makes sense, he’s not surprised, like he’s waiting for an invitation. Ronan reaches out to turn Noah’s face toward him. He points at the flush on Noah’s lips, the red heat tint in the smudge on his smashed-in cheek.

“Casper’s becoming a real boy again.”

///

“Look,” Ronan says, looking up at Gansey like the world’s finally spinning right for the first time in years.

“Casper’s becoming a real boy again.”

Gansey frowns. 

“Does that mean we’re not allowed to kiss him?”

Everyone on the chair freezes in place for a moment and then tandem turns to stare at him.

“What?” Adam asks.

“You want to kiss me?” Noah tries. 

“Isn’t that how the movie works?” Gansey answers, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Casper kisses the girl and he turns into a ghost again?”

“Her name was Kat,” Noah corrects, leveling his pointer finger in Gansey’s direction.

Gansey watches Adam slide a hand under the collar of Noah’s frayed and permanently yellowed Aglionby uniform, and he realizes suddenly that he’s never seen the skin underneath. In the dark, it’s pale, bruised, freckled all over even after seven years of death and no sunlight. The same skin as the day Noah died, stuck in time forever.

“And that was just bad timing anyway,” Adam adds.

“Did you even watch the movie, Gansey?” Ronan chides. He clicks his tongue and it feels playful like Gansey’s been missing.

“Honestly,” he says, tipping his head to the side and not looking anyone in the eye. “I can’t believe you’re all thinking about the plot of _Casper_ at a time like this.”

“Wait,” Noah interrupts. It brings all eyes back to him, including Gansey’s own. Gansey straightens his back, takes his hands out of his pockets, looks at the pink spreading over Noah’s smudgy face. Warmth, happiness maybe. A sign of life.

“You didn’t answer me,” Noah says, egging him on softly. “Does that mean you want to kiss me?”

Gansey waits. He takes a breath.

For years, he’s wondered what it would look like to find Glendower. It’s only natural, he assumes, to wonder what your life will look like when it hits its peak. He knows that will be his; he’s driven himself so far into a hole that it can only be the climb back out of it that ends up his greatest accomplishment. He’s never wanted for anything, thanks to his family. He’s never needed anything but this. The quest itself has been his wish since the beginning: a purpose, a reason, something that’s only his in ways that his money and name never will be.

As soon as he learned the legend, Gansey started considering the wish: will he be selfish or selfless, use it on something stupid and fleeting, use it to change his life? Will he be a good man who deserves the wish in the first place. 

Lately, since the bones, he’s been thinking about something different. Reconciling the boy he knows with the corpse he found is a new quest altogether: the smudge on Noah’s smile versus the cracked cheekbone covered in leaves, the sinking fact that Gansey has lived years because Noah couldn’t.

For the past few weeks, all he’s wanted is to be the kind of person who wishes for Noah’s life back. Now, looking down and seeing him like this, flushed rose nose and happy smile, Gansey’s not sure he’ll need to. 

This might be enough after all.

“I didn’t think,” he starts, and Noah reaches out for him. Pulls him in like the rest of them, the touch finally starting to heat.

Gansey redirects himself. He asks, “Do you feel good?”

Noah leans up and pushes a hand through Gansey’s hair, grabs the ends of it and pulls. Softly, but enough, and Gansey feels it. He looks over and Adam’s trying to mouth a hickey into Noah’s neck, probably, trying to leave something living on him. He can’t. Noah’s dead. 

“Yes,” Noah says. “I want more.”

“Okay,” Gansey answers, tapping his fingers against the leather of the chair. He pulls out his phone.

“I’ll call Blue.”

///

When the phone rings at 300 Fox Way, Blue jumps for it immediately, diving in front of Calla to get to it first.

“Expecting a call?” Calla asks, raising an eyebrow at her.

Blue shoves part of her dinner roll in her mouth and chews loudly, talks around it, puts her hand over the receiver. “No,” she says, rolling her eyes, “I just had a premonition it was Gansey.”

“We don’t joke about those things in this household,” Maura scolds, coming around the corner. 

Blue sticks her tongue out and shoos them away with her free arm, waving the roll wildly. They vacate, and she leans herself against the kitchen wall.

“Hello?”

On the other end of the line, Gansey’s voice floats back to her, asking if Blue is available.

“Hey,” she says, “it’s me.”

She listens for a minute, letting Gansey find his words. She bites off a piece of bread and tries not to chew directly into the receiver, but he can probably hear her anyway.

“You there?” Blue asks after a short silence, prompting him.

“Yeah, I’m here,” Gansey answers. Blue can hear other voices in the background, and she knows them all down in her gut. “Noah needs us.”

Blue barely has time to say, “I’m on my way,” before he hangs up and leaves her finishing the rest of her roll, Calla and Maura looking on. Calla has a spoon in her mouth and Maura’s eyes are soft, questioning.

“Well,” Blue says, hanging up the phone and pushing off the wall, “I was right. It was Gansey. Maybe I’m getting better at this psychic stuff after all.”

She grabs an apple and slides out the door, wondering what he might have meant. Blue’s not surprised by the short call, not worried something’s wrong, she just feels the pull of needing to be where they are as soon as she can possibly can be. Folded back up in them, even though it’s only been an hour, sliding back into being herself.

She’s even less surprised when she gets to Monmouth and finds them prone on the floor, draped over the chair and each other, a mess of mouths and soft, curious fingers. 

“Hey, Jane,” Gansey says, looking up at her like it’s one of their expeditions. Like it’s the first time they trooped into Cabeswater, like moving through whole seasons in a day, like the finding has become the least important part.

“Hey, Dick,” Blue echoes back, and then she drops her bag and kneels to meet them on the hardwood floor. She rests one arm on the knee-high Nino’s by her hip and watches them for a moment, her boys with their hearts in each other’s hands like this, held together and falling apart at once.

It’s beautiful, the way they’re strewn together: Adam leaned against Ronan, Gansey in between their legs, everyone with a hand on Noah’s glowing skin. No one’s hands are passing through him. He looks so solid. He looks like he would bleed if she cut him open, if she kissed him. Like he would cut his lips on his own teeth if he smiled. 

“Noah,” Blue says, and he turns to her. “What do you want?”

“You,” Noah answers, and he reaches for her. 

_Maybe this really is my magic_ , Blue thinks as their hands connect and everything goes bright white for a second. Suddenly the room is electric and she can feel her own power, how it makes everything louder and more urgent, even her own breath, her own want. She closes her eyes against it. For the first time, it’s enough just like that. It’s enough to be the thing that makes people feel until their hearts are full, enough to be the way people make sense of their worlds.

That’s what this is, a clarification, nothing new. They’ve all been each other’s since the beginning. This is just a new way of loving each other, a new way to fit their bodies together until they can’t tell what’s what or whose is whose.

It strikes Blue how light it feels, despite the summer heat and heavy-lidded eyes, despite the demand for more and more and more. She opens her eyes in time to see Noah lean toward Ronan and kiss him until Ronan’s lips are blue and Noah’s flushed bright red.

“Hey, Jane,” she hears again, and then Gansey pulls her into the pile and she laughs.

All the stories about the Aglionby boys never warned her this might happen: how she’d find herself in love with four of them and how they wouldn’t let her fall. When she met them, she was ready for the worst, but never this. 

Those bastards.

///

Noah kisses Adam and feels hungry again, ravenous, and it’s fitting. Noah kisses Ronan and feels like a shot-off firecracker, hollowed out and hot and holy. Noah kisses Gansey and Blue and he feels warm and miles from dead.

The important thing is that Noah feels, Noah feels, he feels. 

The next day, he’s the only one awake when the sun comes up. He watches them the same way he had in the graveyard, hovering above and unable to touch down. He pulls his knees up to his chest on the couch, worries his fingers against the Aglionby jumper he’s still wearing, rubs a palm over the spot where Blue’s fingers sparked him back to life.

“Morning,” Gansey says a few minutes later, yawning while he stretches himself in the sun, rumpled shirt still half unbuttoned and chinos laid out flat over the chair. Beside him, Ronan cracks an eye open and sits up. “Did you sleep?”

Noah shakes his head and smiles down at them, mimicking Gansey’s sleepy voice. “Didn’t need to.”

“What,” Ronan asks, and Noah can see the gears in his head turning even in the early hour. “We didn’t tire you out enough?”

Noah sticks his tongue out and bites down softly, makes a face.

“Guess we’ll have to try harder next time,” Ronan grins, coming up to the couch and folding his legs up beside Noah. He knocks his knuckles against Noah’s temple and Noah smacks him in the chest. His fingers hit hard and solid and he feels strong, even up against all of Ronan’s cracking force. Now that he knows what it’s like to be this sure, so unafraid of flickering out, Noah lets himself have what he wants until it’s gone again.

Blue wakes, Adam wakes, they all touch him turn by turn. He steals another kiss from each of them and watches as they tie themselves up in each other. 

He was wrong before, about the compromise. He’d always thought it was life or death, in between, the waking cold of neither.

Now he knows it’s this: being given the chance to be loved like he never was and never knowing when it might drop out. When they ley line will flicker and he’ll be gone, when they’ll realize they’re kissing a ghost. A dead boy given the chance to live again through their hands.

He watches Adam pour himself cereal and Gansey absentmindedly tousle his hair, Ronan steal the bowl and drain the milk. He watches Blue watch him and smile. It’s enough. The compromise is enough.

 _I’ll take it_ , Noah thinks to himself as Blue finally slides her hand in his, and they both light the room together.

**Author's Note:**

> farah made me do it
> 
> title from purity ring's "obedear." aggressively headcanons that touch and sex don't have to be perfunctory motions for noah once the ley line is woken up
> 
> i don't care that casper came out like 3 years before most of these nerds were born i still think they've all seen it!!! noah probably made them watch it over and over again because he likes friendly ghost stories cause he's a friendly ghost
> 
> ♥ if you want to find me on tumblr [i'm here](http://www.deadnoahs.tumblr.com)


End file.
